Response to Zak: "To ban communism from itself?"

In his post, Zak discusses the question posed in the "Transcript Russian Federation Duma Session with USSR President Gorbachev" that asks whether the Communist Party should be disbanded as a criminal organization. I agree with Zak that such a question, asked to the leader of the communist party in the communist USSR, seems like a dangerous question to ask the head of the communist superpower, but the question and Gorbachev's response highlights the complete 180 Russia had taken since Lenin's reign. During Lenin's time, the communist system was confidently celebrated and was believed to be the supreme and enduring system in Russia. The strength of the Communist Party did not go unnoticed in the West, and Russia's surge to become a major economic and military power under the communist regime caused powers in the West, including the US and Britain, to grow weary of communism and the threat it posed to western democracy. The West was afraid of Russia and unknowledgeable of how great and how expansive the USSR could become. But in really a matter of six months, the entire communist system in Russia unraveled, leaving Russia quietly, a converse to its loud entrance. The pride in the communist system had been lost in years prior to 1991, but belief in the system was one of many causes that determined the USSR's fate. What I believe to have been one of the biggest flaws in the USSR that ultimately triggered its downfall was the empire's size. We have seen a trend throughout European history that as empires expand their borders, cultural tensions and disunities intensify and the reigning government has a hard time maintaining control over the empire's entirety. The USSR encapsulated many eastern european countries, that although small in size, were diverse in cultures. The communist system itself prevented an assimilation of all these cultures, which, if it was achieved, could have created a stronger foundation on which the USSR could survive. But communism relies on a populace that responds solely to the Communist Party and derives its freedoms from it. But such a unification is complicated with cultural boundaries. The specifies of communism cannot be uniform; everyone's interpretation of an ideology is slightly altered from another's according to their personal beliefs or biases. Dubcek, for example, believed in a more liberal system of communism, where additional rights were given to citizens and the economy was decentralized. Dubcek helped induce "Prague Spring," which signified that a major population under the power of the USSR was unhappy with the communist system. The inflexibility of the communist ideology would have to come into conflict with the diversity of cultures the USSR strapped together under the empire.